021 | Broken Hearts, Open Hearts
5:47 am, Sunday
My Back Patio
Dear Beautiful Humans,
I’m sitting outside this morning, even though it’s 43 degrees outside, but that’s what my soul so clearly spoke to me it needed this morning ... OUTSIDE.
I started to go for a walk with my coffee, but could sense I needed to be still. The past few months, it has been movement I craved. Walks. But now, I strongly feel my spirit pulling me to physical stillness. To sitting. So I grabbed a blanket and my down jacket, and here I sit, on my patio looking out at the hazy sky.
The birds are starting to sing. A candle flickers beside me while I sip glorious hot coffee to help stay warm.
Two weeks ago, my heart broke open in Telluride at the Mountainfilm Festival. It was a breaking that had been coming for a while, and the timing and space and people I encountered were what I needed to be pushed to a state of openness I can’t run from or undo, and this is a gloriously good thing.
I was talking with a friend this week about some of the things that have been stirring in my broke open heart, specifically, the difficult things I’m seeing that are humbling, and at times, discouraging. It’s hard to see how you are not the person you want to be.
What’s fascinating, is that as I’ve shared some of my fears and insecurities with my closest people the week, and the very things I think I’m not, they say is incredibly obvious that I am! How does THAT work?! I think because the things we most wish we were is a mirror to how we already are, and so we are hyper-sensitive to the times we are not moving about the world in a way that aligns with this truth.
I do think I have a lot of work and deep healing to do in my heart, and I’m not wholly the person I want to be yet, but as I hold that truth, I want to also hold the truth that I am a good person. A good person who has bad days sometimes. As a another friend said to me so kindly as I was undercutting myself at the start of the week, “Even Oprah has bad days.”
Sometimes we don’t show up fully as ourselves, and if we believe it matters to do that, we are hyper-aware when we don’t show up the best we could. I’m trying to be more kind to myself as I show up. To not demand perfection, which is a twisted fear of not being good enough for me. It’s not about being good enough. I’m already good. You’re already good. It’s that we’re human.
A friend gave me a wooden heart at Telluride for my open heart. It was a little thing that reminds me of big things. And then another friend gave me a tiny soapstone heart this week, something they had got for me before knowing about the wooden heart. So now I have these two beautiful physical reminders.
I want heal and not feel like I have to live with a broken heart, and I want to always love with an open one.
To open hearts,
Shel
